M-exit

"...where all his songs were in his house on Long Island, and to go and get them."


CUSTOMER RECEIPT

What a gray mountain!
but eating this donut
is a great start
to the morning, --

getting to the filling like penetrating
the madly enfolded histories --
like realizing the Indo-Europeans
really did come from Africa.

Those parents, who hated
rock-n-roll for totally unhinging
the country generations
from control, were electrified
themselves, by Big Band, The Wasteland,
Trouble in Paradise, and still were
right on in their fears -- go figure.

Anyway, yeah man, this donut, is
fuckin' sick -- like Hendrix
in "Watchtower" -- like wandering
that green corridor again, except
all at once.





SONNET

The river-bones of trees relate the tale
With wind like eyes that move the things to life
That sing and speak and tell again the tale
A page of bones a sky relates of life.
We loved the songs our mothers knew of rivers,
And those like night our fathers had of mountains,
And night itself that covered over slivers
The waking waters breaking from the fountain
Made of time we worshiped by the shadows
The moving arms of trees made of the light
While wind became the water in our meadows
To sing of how to bear the day by night.

The birds by now were flotsam on a river
The moving stones the trees made of the river.

Sonnet

Of myself I have heard via mirrors
Of others -- things could be worse. The highway
Keeps its particular distance, Sears-
Starbucks, and like caves, lamp-lots, “thattaway,
If you need them,” they tell me, rippling
In the onset of the helicopter
Parade -- but free to keep a clean house, wing
To wing, in a skull behind windows, sure
Of a place in the shadows, chattering.

A spider over tabletops free-falls,
Ascends the chairs, makes clouds in the ceiling,
Wakes to the news, others' thumps in its walls,

Reflecting my own dimensions, a shelf
Made of listening, at the edge of the self.